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Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

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Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#571

Post by maigret »

HappMacDonald wrote: post #255
kragen wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible, but you may have noticed that out of the ≈200 countries in the world, over the last 20 years, about 180 of them have completely failed to develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers, and about 100 of them have completely failed to develop a native industry of anything, continuing their agrarian and resource-extraction economies more or less as they have been for centuries, just with imported…

> for the same reasons the US still doesn't have any high-speed trains 60 years after the Shinkansen entered service and still doesn't have a moon base 56 years after Neil Armstrong. So.. lack of demand and ROI?

Transport is heavily dependent on infrastructure. If you have a train between city A and city B but you can get to and from the train station without a car, this is not going to work.

But markets are far from the only mover here. Regulation, lobbying, habits... Also I guess the US would feel ashamed for not building their trains themselves in the first place, they would probably have to buy them abroad... So "proudness" is probably a factor here too.

High speed trains in the part of Europe I know are very well utilized and even a bit too crowded to my taste (still way better than planes - allow working easily with table, walking, no absurd wait times waiting in line at the airports, arrive much nearer to my actual goals...).

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#572

Post by sn9 »

lukan wrote: post #495
sn9 wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have quite a bit of experience transporting hydrocarbons . . . .

We do, but even in peacetimes not without issues. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills But the problem mentioned above was about war.

Sure but moving from a few centralized sources of fossil fuels to a globally distributed and decentralized network of sources of synthetic biofuels means transport distances are a tiny percentage of what they are with fossil fuels.

This consequently scales down the scale of any spill or security issue.

Like the difference between nicking a capillary and nicking an aorta.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#573

Post by jes5199 »

dalyons wrote: post #504
jes5199 wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been following Seba since around 2020, and it's wild how: 1) he continues to be correct 2) people are still very slow to believe him his predictions have gotten a LOT more dramatic lately, I can't wait to see if he's still nailing it

where do you follow him? i just poked around in X & youtube but all his stuff there seems ~a year old.

Tony himself doesn’t post frequently, but his new book “Stellar” is worth checking out. Some of the other RethinkX people, Adam Dorr @adam_dorr and Bradd Libby @bradd_libby are better at posting high-frequency updates using Seba’s models. former-RethinkX researcher Nafeez Ahmed has a blog that is also worth checking out: ageoftransformation.org

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#574

Post by kragen »

seec wrote: post #568
roenxi wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention that 20 years is enough time to develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers. The issue with oil is it requires a constant flow of resources from specific locations in the world that are blessed by geography. Solar power has much less of that going on.

Can you build an industrial plant to build the panels only using solar power? How and from where do you source the necessary primary materials for such an endeavor? If you try to answer those questions you will see that you are bullshiting yourself.

I have tried, actually. Maybe you can share what you've learned when you, hypothetically, investigated the question yourself. I'll start.

You do need materials, but you can source the materials anywhere on Earth; it's just a question of how expensive it is to refine them. Every element occurs as an impurity in every rock at some level. When you can import them freely, some deposits are uneconomic.

For building a plant to refine silicon, things like platinum and iridium, which are very scarce in most rocks, are very helpful. But they aren't ingredients in the solar cells themselves. Solar cells themselves are made of silicon, aluminum, silver†, lead, and tin, with trace quantities of phosphorus (or arsenic) and boron. These are mounted to "ultra-white" glass, which is made of silicon again, oxygen, sodium, calcium, and trace amounts of manganese. The mounting is done typically with EVA, which is mostly a hydrocarbon with a little oxygen in it.

The total amount of these materials is surprisingly small. The silicon wafer (2.33g/cc) is about 100μm thick, and the glass (2.5g/cc) is typically 2.5mm thick (3.2mm is "ultra thick"). So a square meter of solar panels, rated at some 200W, contains 6.3kg of glass (mostly oxygen and silicon) and 0.23kg of crystalline silicon, plus much smaller amounts of other materials.

So raw materials aren't a constraining factor unless you're living on a barge or a space station or something. Knowhow, organization, discipline, cooperation, etc., are the constraining factors. Sadly, those are in short supply almost everywhere.

______

† Silver is used for large conductive strips on the surface of the silicon; it can be replaced with copper at a significant loss of efficiency. There is already pressure to do this because the raw-materials cost of silver accounted for about 10% of the wholesale cost of current PV modules last time I checked, and about 10% of global silver production went into PV modules. Since then production has increased and PV prices have dropped.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#575

Post by pydry »

fastball wrote: post #566
pydry wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And honestly, I'm still skeptical of the price difference. PV needs lots of things (transformers, transmission, storage, disposal, land use, etc) that are frequently not priced in. You should be less skeptical. With a LCOE difference of 5x there is more than a little wiggle room to price in extra storage and transmission costs and still end up way cheaper. That is how every kilowatt hour generated with solar and win…

Where are you getting a LCOE diff of 5x? The latest Lazard's is 2x. Transmission costs will require more than "wiggle room" if you are sending power from some cornfield in middle America to Seattle. Also a big question in my mind is "where can the price go from here". I don't imagine there is a huge amount of room left for optimization of solar, where as with nuclear I think almost everyone agrees that it is about as…

Lazard says utility solar and onshore wind is ~$40 per MWh while nuclear power is ~$200.

Offshore wind is more like $70, but also has double the capacity factor, so requires less matching storage.

We've been told for about 3 decades that any day soon microreactors/thorium/fusion will lead to cheaper, safer nuclear power and no doubt for the next 3 decades some people will continue to believe.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#576

Post by specialist »

kragen wrote: post #184
jillesvangurp wrote: post #175

The article doesn't mention a technology that deserves some attention because it counters the biggest and most obvious deficiency in solar: the sun doesn't always shine. That technology is cables. Cables allow us to move energy over long distances. And with HVCD cables that can mean across continents, oceans, time zones, and climate regions. The nice things about cables is that they are currently being underutilized.…

Plausible alternatives to cables include ships full of synthetic diesel, ships full of iron, ships full of aluminum, or ships full of magnesium. Inside China HVDC cables are indeed carrying solar power across the continent, but the Netherlands have not managed to erect any yet. Cables provide efficient JIT power delivery, but they're vulnerable to precision-guided missiles, which Ukrainians are 3-D printing in their…

> ships full of iron

At first I thought you meant "embodied energy" or some such.

Iceland "exports" geothermal energy by converting bauxite ore into aluminum.

Australian could "export" renewable energy by domestically converting iron ore into steel.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#577

Post by kragen »

specialist wrote: post #576
kragen wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plausible alternatives to cables include ships full of synthetic diesel, ships full of iron, ships full of aluminum, or ships full of magnesium. Inside China HVDC cables are indeed carrying solar power across the continent, but the Netherlands have not managed to erect any yet. Cables provide efficient JIT power delivery, but they're vulnerable to precision-guided missiles, which Ukrainians are 3-D printing in their…

> ships full of iron At first I thought you meant "embodied energy" or some such. Iceland "exports" geothermal energy by converting bauxite ore into aluminum. Australian could "export" renewable energy by domestically converting iron ore into steel.

Yes, but remove the scare quotes; I'm talking about exporting those materials to people who burn them for energy, in most cases in batteries. The round-trip efficiency of that process is not great, but I think should be around 70% for aluminum, and better for iron and magnesium; and the specific energy (MJ/kg) for those metals is significantly better than for conventional hydrocarbon fuels.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#578

Post by specialist »

GrumpyNl wrote: post #476
jillesvangurp wrote: post #175

The article doesn't mention a technology that deserves some attention because it counters the biggest and most obvious deficiency in solar: the sun doesn't always shine. That technology is cables. Cables allow us to move energy over long distances. And with HVCD cables that can mean across continents, oceans, time zones, and climate regions. The nice things about cables is that they are currently being underutilized.…

Despite all the great technology and improvements over the years, consumer energy in Europe has never been so expensive.

In the USA, eg California, the cost of building out the grid we need (to achieve netzero) is mostly borne by retail consumers. Versus industry and data centers. (IIRC)

Obviously, this creates huge push back, threatening the transition to renewables.

The Correct Answer remains federal policy and support. Just like the New Deal Era's electrification of our country.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#579

Post by kragen »

more_corn wrote: post #565
kragen wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may have seen that Colombian drug cartels are already using Starlink-piloted "sea drones" to do ocean-based shipping through blockades. The US Coast Guard estimates that 90% of crewed narcosubs get through: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aPLXdtbLZ0

The autonomous boat got intercepted on a test run.

What?

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#580

Post by freeopinion »

pshirshov wrote: post #443
freeopinion wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point the finger at yourself. Why didn't you personally build and operate a plant? Why would you expect different behavior from others?

I did personally build and operate a plant. Literally.

I think that is awesome. Is it still going?
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